Robin Willis

Tomorrow is the start of the first Willis-Orellana Family Holiday! Our bags are packed, and we can just snatch a couple of hours’ sleep before our shuttle bus picks us up at 5am to take us to the airport.

It’s about the worst time to be leaving the garden, but we have friends house-sitting for us while we’re away, to water everything and eat the explosion of tomatoes that is about to manifest. We tried the very first ripe ones today, and they were extremely tasty!

This is a very mini-blog, as bed is calling.

UK people: see you very soon!

US people: see you when we get back!

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Not counting the hours or anything, but it’s only six days until we set off for England for our two-and-a-half week summer holiday! Can’t wait for that first real pint of real ale.

In anticipation of the USA and England matches last weekend, Jamie and I went and kicked a ball around in Victory Park for as long as we had the stamina. (About forty minutes.)

It’s now nearly a week later, and my shinsplints have just about recovered. We must do that more often; it definitely feels beneficial, and you know you’re doing some good if you get out breath so quickly! I’ve had some lower back pain in the past few months, which was strangely relieved by this (and also, curiously, by digging in the garden).

So on Saturday morning we established ourselves at Lucky Baldwins pub in Old Town, well in advance of the USA match (kickoff 11:30 local time) and ordered breakfast and a beer. The match was best forgotten though, as was the dismal England match the next day. Better luck next time chaps…

Our crop of beans. This was all of them – about three servings, at a stretch! They were very tasty… but I suspect we need to fertilise them better to get a more worthwhile crop. It doesn’t work out too economically with such a pitiful volume: the plants were probably more than a pack of beans would have been!

Early morning sunlight streams into our spare bedroom.

Luckily these traffic jams don’t happen too often, but they really don’t make my commute any more pleasant. Bumper-to-bumper on the 118 freeway, still 30 miles from home… (at least I can have the roof down though).

…Where did I leave the cat-opener, anyway? More comedy signs at Rose Tree Cottage.

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Yarr, me hearties! Arrrr! Ahoy there! It do have been a good long while since I did last be afloat! But this last yon weekend recently I did truly reinstate me sea legs! Yo ho ho and a bottle of whatever I can be laying me hands on!

Our old neighbours from the apartment (Darryl and Eletta) have a friend Richard (Eletta’s boss’s husband), with a BOAT. This makes him a very valuable person to know. He’s always working on it, and going out for half-day sailng trips, so when he requested another pair of hands, I jumped at the chance and went along for the day.

The boat is kept in a dry storage at the Channel Islands Harbour in Oxnard, a good two hours’ drive north and west from here, so Darryl and I had an early start, to drive up and meet Richard, and make the most of the day.

The boatyard chap pulls the boat (the Alice Maye) forward out of her space, so we can access her and do a couple of jobs before getting afloat. There’s no-one else around in the boatyard, despite it being a beautiful day. Lots of under-used boats – there are plenty for sale, too, at only $3000-4000… hmmm… tempting…

A quick trip to the chandlery (sweet shop / candy store) to scratch the retail-therapy itch, oh yeah and to buy some essentials like new rope too!

Mast down, to fit new ropes, replace some very knackered blocks (pulleys), and give a general health check:

Lovely shiny new ropes in place!

One other boat in the yard was not so lucky – her jib furling mechanism had come loose in a 40mph wind, and with the sail on the flap, the mast didn’t stand a chance.

A textural close-up of the Alice Maye’s mounting plate for the outboard engine. Crispy! Boats provide excellent subjects for experimental fun photography… if I did this more often, I might invest in some more appropriate equipment…

One other job was to repaint the boat’s name on the side of the hull.

A steady hand required!

She gets a quick clean down, to remove muddy footprints before setting sail.

Marina chap gets back on his little tractor to tow her to the lift.

Strapped up, she is airborne!

Carefully maneouvred into the water:

We are afloat! Starting the outboard involves taking it apart and filling it with starting fluid, but eventually it idles smoothly, and we are ready to go.

Out on the water, sails set, we can turn off the engine and let the wind do the work! This is when the magic of sailing is finally felt, as there is nothing but you and the wind, the boat and the waves.

There’s a perfect healthy breeze, so our progress is swift but not hair-raising.

Lunch is a rather large burger:

Darryl takes the helm, as skipper Richard relaxes. Not another boat in sight! Stark contrast to the south coast of Britain, where you can’t go half a mile without encountering ferries, yuppies or lost pedalos.

We didn’t go far from land. Just far enough to know that you could go further if you wanted. (And if you had the next day off work.)

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Last weekend we decided to dig a second vegetable patch. We are running short of space in the first one!

We might as well make it big, so we allocated a 24ft x 5ft plot and staked it out. The northern side of the plot (on the left of the picture) will at some point have a nice fence running across the garden to divide it up between the tidy lawn side (eventually it will be a real lawn) and the mucky vegetable patch side.

Our existing ‘lawn’ looks like this before we start – crab grass and wood-chip mulch. We have to rake as much of this up off the surface as possible, before we can start digging out the roots of the weeds.

Jamie raking the mulch and weeds. Hot work in the sun!

Digging is hard work too – constantly bending down to pick out the roots and bash the earth off. These are the crab grass roots: each plant is a mess of roots, probably 5-10 large white roots per plant, each up to 2ft long. You have to dig these up completely; if you leave even a small bit in the ground, they will grow back!

Weeds mostly removed from most of the plot. There will be stragglers…

Some of the new border is now in place. It feels like we’re really starting to conquer the garden, now, with two veg patches and even a pathway between them!

Jamie cooling off in the hose – this felt so refreshing! We dried off in minutes.

Next door’s tiny noisy cat, adventuring on our porch.

Squirrels have been chewing on the main overhead power lines running into our house – apparently they like to sharpen their teeth on it. Four or so of the six strands of the main earth cable, providing the mechanical strength for it, were chewed away. It could have been catastrophic given a few more months or years.

We called the Pasadena City chaps in, to have a look (luckily this is their responsibility to maintain), and they declared it a Code One Red Emergency and repaired it straight away!

Nice shiny new cable glinting in the sunlight:

This is a low-flying bomber on Memorial Day, on the same day as the Spring Bank Holiday in the UK. There were also seven planes in formation, making several passes up and down the valley – most impressive.

Memorial Day Burger, that evening, at Jean and Marcos’ house.

We’ve splashed out on another new piece of furniture for the dining room, a cabinet/dresser type thing with cupboards and some wine storage space. A flat-pack job from CostPlus, with reasonable quality wood (mostly solid hardwood) and a nice dark ‘distressed’ finish.

Assembled, it really completes the room – and makes it look a little less like we’ve just moved in.

First pickings from the courgette plant – we have had several more since – they are tasty!

Dad came to visit for a few all-too-short days, this last weekend. He was able to squeeze it in before a work trip to Chicago, not exactly ‘on his way’, but worth doing while on the same land mass at least.

We had a very good weekend, eating and drinking far too much, with a big Sunday lunch: sixteen of us around the table – a real testament to the space in our dining room, and to the sheer volume of cutlery, crockery, serving plates, chairs etc we have accumulated so far! Pictures to follow…

There was also an excellent meal at Noir (one of our favourite restaurants), breakfast on the porch, a barbeque at Ken and Celeste’s, a brief visit to Santa Monica and the beach, a walk around Griffith Observatory overlooking the city of Los Angeles, plenty of driving around with the top down, and an Ethiopian meal. Quite a busy weekend. Again it was great to be able to share some of the more local experiences.

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We’ve done very little to the house lately, instead just inching forward in the garden with tending our veggies, tidying up, weeding, clearing, chopping back and organising. We face a constant battle to tame our garden, over the years to come. The biggest challenge is fitting all the cleared rubbish into the garden waste bin each week! (Still, we’re happy to have it collected weekly, as opposed to fortnightly as in much of the UK. Also the bin is pretty large!)

Plants tend to multiply – once people know you’re growing your own veg, they start giving you more! So far we’ve been donated one courgette plant from Celeste, one tomato plant, and one ‘giant banana’ squash plant from our old neighbour Will.

The first courgette plant, and the pumpkin plant, starting to explode… these will start fighting for space in about a week!

Other veg – tomatoes, parsley, beans, lettuces, carrots, peppers, chillies. The little pot is an earwig trap, filled with beer, vegetable oil, soy sauce and sugar. So far there are ten or fifteen casualties. (Another of the local fauna bent on blighting our happy existence.)

Chillis! I suspect we will be inundated with these; there will be too many to eat fresh, so I plan to make chilli pickle with them (like Patak’s).

Tom-ay-dohs. We have two normal-sized tomato plants, one cherry tomato, and whatever Will gave us!

First strawberry. It was delicious; we shared it.

Our neighbour Jeanette has had a lot of the dead tree cleared away from her side of the garden by our garage, possibly inspired by my cutting back the same mess from our side. (Filled the bin.) Consequently there is ten times the amount of light coming through, which will be good for the veggies, and probably also good for the weeds that want to sprout up from the nice bare patch of earth there.

I can now stand in the corner by the garage there, and get a novel view of the house (showing the pine tree in urgent and expensive need of trimming):

There is also vegetation to cut back on my head. I just haven’t had the time for a haircut!

We started, and soon thereafter finished, Jamie’s egg from the Easter Mummy. Really nice… mmm.. tastes like England…

Ken and I went for a random late-night mission to get tacos from one of the many taco trucks in Pasadena. They’re a lot like the kebab vans in England, just with more meat and less salmonella. I hope. These look somewhat repellant, but are in fact delicious.

Development has finally started in the vacant plot near Jamie’s parents’ house. There are two or three model homes built already, so Jamie and I went for a nosy peek. They’re “very nice”, but they really aren’t “Tiramisu”. They look great, with good layout, airy living spaces, high ceilings, vast kitchen pantries and bedroom closets. The quality of the fixtures and fittings, though, is only adequate. The developers could have spent an additional few grand – a fraction of the cost of the house – and fitted higher quality handles, windows, counter tops etc. This would have matched the potential and appeal of the properties.

The view from the master bedrooms is stunning. It was a bright, clear, green spring day, and the mountains really looked their best. We reckon these houses (three- to four-bedrooms, two- to three- bathrooms, 2600 square feet inside area) could be getting on for a million dollars each. The view is a not insignificant part of that…

Back to our own, more ‘characterful’ abode, and encouraged by the glamour of the possibilities we had observed, I plasterboarded the right hand side of the stairs to the basement. More rats at bay!

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